The Second Shift - A Photographic Investigation into the Work of Home: Keynote, Visualising the Home Conference, University of Cumbria

This keynote shares the author’s ongoing investigations into the difficulties and potential of using photography to research home. She focuses on the ‘second shift’: the routine domestic practices of housework and care traditionally carried out by women outside their paid employment. Hidden in plain sight and veiled by familiarity and insignificance, housework is largely absent from photographs of home and family. She asks how photography might provide the means to appreciate the complexity and value in these domestic practices, as well as offering possibilities for resistance to the systems which denigrate them.